Is This Thing On?http://www.mattarmstrong.co.uk
Disgruntled Tech Writer Complains About stuffFri, 18 Mar 2016 00:11:41 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1Is Understood To Be More Than Doublehttp://www.mattarmstrong.co.uk/2016/03/18/is-understood-to-be-more-than-double/
Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:10:32 +0000http://www.mattarmstrong.co.uk/?p=1666read more]]>I’ve already posted this to Twitter (twice, actually) but I’m going to keep posting it until someone else finds it as funny as I do.

For some reason The Age chose not to publish my letter. Can’t think why…

*

Sir,

I almost choked on my cornflakes reading Scott Phillips of The Motley Fool in today’s Money section explaining “How to avoid investing in the next Dick Smith“. One answer to this might be “don’t listen to what the so-called experts say”. As recently as October last year one stock picking service was extremely bullish on DSH, writing that it was trading at “bargain prices”, with “more upside than downside”.

“Looking past the short-term factors could result in a very Foolish reward for those willing to take the plunge”, they said. “Dick Smith is a stable stock with great dividend and growth prospects.”

]]>The Youth of Yesterdayhttp://www.mattarmstrong.co.uk/2015/08/18/the-youth-of-yesterday/
Tue, 18 Aug 2015 12:29:13 +0000http://www.mattarmstrong.co.uk/?p=1641read more]]>Rather like that Douglas Adams quote and the xkcd comic about getting old and fearing technology, it seems that once you reach a certain age you become gripped with the feeling that the youth of today are nothing but no good layabouts who know nothing and expect the moon on a stick to be handed to them on a plate…

You know. This sort of thing, which popped up in my Facebook feed earlier today:

Hang on a minute, though. What’s that you say Mr Gates:

Rule 3… You won’t be a vice president with a car phone

A car phone? What’s that granddad?

This, plus the Friends reference in rule ten, are your first clues that maybe this wasn’t a recent speech to today’s no good kids. In fact, Snopes tells me it’s from a 1996 newspaper column written by some guy you’ve never heard of called Charles J. Sykes.

So those no good kids that this is referring to, with “no concept of reality” and “set up for failure in the real world” would be in their mid to late 30s now…

Hang on a minute: I was doing my A-Levels in 1996. Is he talking about me? Are you saying I’ll never be a VP driving around with my car phone?

At least we have wifi now. I probably could do my job from the coffee shop…

Can it really be 10 years since the day Blur and Oasis released Country House/Roll With It on the same day…

Well there’s still nothing that highlights the passing of the years to me quite like Time-Since-Britpop™. Those heady mid 90s days when any group of lads with a couple of guitars who’d been to The Good Mixer at least once could bag themselves a record deal, a Melody Maker cover and get their CD single digipack catapulted to the dizzy heights of one week at number 18 in the charts.

I was transported back on a wave of nostalgia last week when we went to see Blur play a predominately Greatest Hits set at Rod Laver Arena for a generally appreciative Melbourne crowd (who clearly hadn’t really listened to The Magic Whip…)

Part way through This Is A Low I suddenly had a very clear memory of listening to them being interviewed by Simon Mayo on Radio 1 in the week before Parklife came out. 1994. Gosh, doesn’t 1994 all seem like such a long time ago now? I didn’t even own my own copy of Parklife — although I did record my sister’s CD onto tape so I could listen to it without having to steal her copy from its prized spot in the 3 CD changer thingy at the top of her stereo (this of course was back in the days before home taping killed music).

I was also struck by how dated many of the references in the songs were — there’s something very late 90s about The Universal, for example. All lottery references and “satellites in every home”. Damon even introduced Trouble In The Message Centre as their “pre-internet” song (come to think of it, I’m not sure “message centre” was a particularly current reference in the 90s either…) But luckily those songs still sound as majestic as ever, dated or not.

Oh, and they played bloody Trimm Trabb again. Seriously lads, why are you doing this to me?

]]>Oh Man. Twenty Years. Where The Hell Did That Go?http://www.mattarmstrong.co.uk/2014/08/29/oh-man-twenty-years-where-the-hell-did-that-go/
Fri, 29 Aug 2014 06:35:59 +0000http://www.mattarmstrong.co.uk/?p=1611read more]]>It has come to my attention that the third Manics album, The Holy Bible, was released twenty years ago today, on the 29th of August 1994. I have a clear memory of catching the bus into Southport, as a spotty 16 year old, to go and buy it from Our Price.

It was the first CD that I ever bought with my own money.

Of course I’d bought records before — so, so many embarrassing records ** — and cassettes, but I’d come to the party with CDs somewhat late. I’d only just got my first CD player the week before (a reward from my parents for doing well in my GCSEs) and The Holy Bible was the third CD in my collection, joining Definitely Maybe and His n Hers, which had both been given to me.

They were soon to be joined by hundreds more, the proceeds of my first job washing dishes at the Cathay Garden, but The Holy Bible was the one I played to death. I can still remember almost all of the lyrics, and I could probably quote you any of those little snippets of speech that play at the start of most tracks (“I wonder who you think you are? You damn well think you’re god or something? God give life and god taketh it away. Not you. I think you are the devil itself…”, “I eat too much to die, and not enough to stay alive; I’m piggy in the middle…”) For a while it was the default disc that I left in the player — this being a time when you had to get up and walk across the room, pick something out of a case and physically swap the disc if you wanted to listen to something else — and because I used it as my alarm, the opening riff of Yes still engages some kind of Pavlovian response that makes me think I should get out of bed and go and study A-Level Maths…

But now twenty years have passed and my copy of The Holy Bible is gathering dust in my parents’ house, and I’m on the other side of the world carrying round a small rectangular device that can store several thousand songs and fits in my pocket. Every now and again I experience a pang of nostalgia for mid nineties indie. I recently chucked everything I have from 1994 and 1995 back onto my pocket sized magical music device and have been enjoying rediscovering the delights of many forgotten and not so forgotten indie bands (…Gene, the Bluetones, Sleeper, Suede, The Wannadies…) I wonder what happened to all of them?

Now they’re as far in the past as Glam Rock was when I was listening to britpop. Oh man. Twenty years. This is what it feels like to get old, isn’t it?

** For reasons lost to history, the first record I ever owned was Chas n Dave’s 1987 Tottenham Hotspur FA Cup song, Hot Shot Tottenham. To this day I have no idea what possessed the nine year old me to want to own this 7 inch single — I am not and have never been a Spurs fan; I was a (clearly somewhat confused) Everton supporter even then. Perhaps I just really liked the song…

We were cutting through Parliament Gardens on our way to the city when we heard the muffled sound of a loudspeaker.

“Is that the Grand Prix?” I wondered aloud to Sal. A reasonable assumption I thought, given that the bee swarm like buzz of the cars whizzing around Albert Park had been clearly audible across much of inner Melbourne for the last few days. But as we turned the corner into Spring Street and saw crowds of photographers on the steps of the Parliament building and the police holding the traffic at bay, it was clear that some kind of protest was taking place on Bourke Street.

It wasn’t immediately obvious what the focus of the protest was: I could see signs attacking brown coal and promoting solar power but mixed in were some asking us to “Save Australia Post” and, quite wonderfully, “Stop Being Awful”. (Although no Down With This Sort Of Thing, sadly).

As we walked down Bourke Street it became clear that the crowds were heading straight for us, so we ducked back onto the steps of the Palace Theatre to let them pass.

Teh internets tell me this was the #MarchInMarch. How have I not heard of this before? It seems you can turn up and march for whatever you like, and thousands of Melbournians young and old had chosen to do just that.

Despite the disparate causes, there were some common themes.

People before Profits. Gina Rinehart. Tony Abbott.

I can’t imagine that the “save our posties” guys, or the small group rather bizarrely asking for adoption to be made harder (no, me neither), or the “solar power” crew would necessarily hold the same views on everything, but everyone in that crowd could agree that Tony Abbott is a massive dick. If it’s possible to take a positive out of a negative, then the one thing you can say about last year’s election result is that at least it’s given us something we can all focus on. In many ways he is our George Bush. And I can’t quite imagine Malcolm Turnbull evoking the same sort of collective anger.

After a few more minutes of watching, we somehow made our way across to the other side of Bourke Street (it’s a bit like crossing the road in Thailand–you’ve just got to go for it…) and found a table at the Mess Hall, where we sipped lattes and perused the brunch menu while the crowds of thousands continued to stream past outside.

“What did you do in the revolution, daddy?”

“Er, well, I kind of missed it. But I did have the most delightful free range organic scrambled eggs on sourdough while it was happening outside…”

]]>Oh FFS, Not Again: The Economist Worldwide Cost of Living Index is Not a Cost of Living Indexhttp://www.mattarmstrong.co.uk/2014/03/05/oh-ffs-not-again-the-economist-worldwide-cost-of-living-index-is-not-a-cost-of-living-index/
Wed, 05 Mar 2014 02:50:30 +0000http://www.mattarmstrong.co.uk/?p=1571read more]]>So every six months it seems The Age re-runs what is essentially the same story as the latest incarnation of The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Worldwide Cost of Living Index is released.

It’s cheaper to live in Copenhagen, Hong Kong or New York City than it is to reside in Sydney or Melbourne, according to the Worldwide Cost of Living Index compiled by the The Economist’s intelligence unit.

Really? But hang on a minute, what’s this:

Sydney ranked fifth and Melbourne equal sixth on the list, released on Tuesday, US-time. That was actually a drop of two ranks for each city since the last survey was released last year.

…

Jon Copestake, the editor of the index, said a recent decline in the Australian dollar meant that Australian cities in 2014 offered slightly better value for money, resulting in their slight drop in rankings.

“The long-term rise of the Australian dollar, which has doubled in value in the last decade, has fallen back lately, with a corresponding decline in relative prices,” he said.

Well that’s interesting: why would the recent drop in the Aussie dollar make Melbourne and Sydney slightly better value places to live? If I live in Melbourne and earn money in local currency, then why would a fall in the value of the Aussie dollar make it cheaper to live here? Wouldn’t a weaker dollar make it more expensive in some respects, pushing up the price of imported goods, for example?

Maybe it’s because (as I wrote back in 2011) The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Worldwide Cost of Living Index is not really a cost of living index at all. As the report itself says:

The Worldwide Cost of Living survey enables human resources line managers and expatriate executives to compare the cost of living in over 130 cities in nearly 90 countries and calculate fair compensation policies for relocating employees.

Everything is converted back into US Dollars. Any movement in the position of Australian cities is almost entirely a result of exchange rate fluctuations. As the Aussie dollar got stronger, those cities rocketed up the list. And now that the Aussie has weakened they are slowly falling back.

It’s really a cost of relocating from the US and paying for things with US dollars survey. Which is perfectly fine if you use it for the purpose it is intended to be used for, but you can’t take the information in the report and try to draw conclusions for people who already live in those cities and earn money in local currency.

I don’t doubt that Sydney and Melbourne belong somewhere high up on a list of expensive cities in the world, but I strongly suspect that their average wages would also put them pretty high up on a list of the richest cities in the world.

And if you don’t look at the cost of living as a proportion of average wages then your results are utterly meaningless.

It’s one of those great quotes to remember if you ever hear or read someone lazily complaining about technology ruining everything that was great about life (or, heaven forbid, catch yourself starting to think that way…)

The writer offers a varied list of complaints about how people today are doing it wrong, with all this technology they are carrying around allowing them to do stuff like film gigs, or have fictional relationships with Scarlett Johansson. Even, gosh, not talk to strangers in cafes:

Today, I watch as people sit in cafes alone, with headphones plugged in, eyes fixed on a scrolling personal tablet or phone screen, cocooned from their surrounds and people next to them. They’re chatting online to people they’ve never met in person.

Yeah. Because before smartphones I couldn’t stop talking to strangers whenever I was in a cafe on my own.

At least I’m not staring at strangers eating their lunch. Maybe you’re the weirdo in this scenario…

I was going to write more about this, but as with most things in life, there’s an XKCD comic for that. It makes the point far, far better than I ever could:

]]>China Eastern Airlines Passenger Eats For Free For A Year? I Call Bullsh…http://www.mattarmstrong.co.uk/2014/02/05/china-eastern-airlines-passenger-eats-for-free-for-a-year-i-call-bullsh/
Tue, 04 Feb 2014 22:00:45 +0000http://www.mattarmstrong.co.uk/?p=1545read more]]>So there’s this story doing the rounds. It tells of an enterprising guy in China who supposedly managed to eat for free for the best part of a year, purely by purchasing a first class ticket, which he then used to access the airline lounge. Once he’d finished eating for free in the lounge, he simply cancelled and rebooked his fully refundable ticket for the following day, and then repeated the exercise 299 times. When the airline found out, he cancelled the ticket and got a full refund.

Now we all like a story of the little guy finding a loophole to get one over the big corporation, but there’s something about this story that just doesn’t ring true for me.

It’s certainly been reported uncritically by churnalists worldwide with column inches to fill and pageviews to generate.

But let’s think about it for a moment. This guy can’t afford to pay for food, but he does supposedly have enough disposable income for a first class plane ticket (even if he gets the money back at the end, he still had to have enough spare cash to have the cost of the ticket tied up for the best part of a year).

And what about getting to the airport? Wouldn’t the cost of transport or parking outweigh the benefits of the free food?

Even assuming our hero works at the airport, or lives nearby, then he’d still have to check in every day and then proceed through security (as far as I can tell from this website, all of the lounges at Xi’an Airport are airside).

I’m not a fan of clearing airport security at the best of times. Is it really worth going through all that hassle every day just for a free feed?

And we’re supposed to believe that he got away with this 300 times? Don’t you think the staff at the check-in desk and at the lounge might have started to recognise him long before his three hundredth attempt?

As far as I can tell the story was first reported in the media in Kwong Wah Yit Poh, a Malaysian Chinese newspaper, from there it was picked up by News Limited, and from there, it spread like wildfire, each report gleefully repeating the same information without a moment’s thought to the fact that none of it stands up to even the most basic scrutiny.

It’s more interesting for what it doesn’t say than for what it does. It quickly skips right over what to me would be the most interesting part of the story:

While total thefts hit a 10-year low of 9624 in the 2012-13 financial year, the number of cars fewer than five years old being stolen hit an eight-year high

If ever you wanted an illustration that good news does not sell papers, then here it is.

Who cares about the good news that car thefts are at an all time low, when there’s a scare story about thieves breaking into houses to steal car keys to write instead?

To be fair, the online version of the articledoes include this graph (not shown by default, but it’s there if you bother to click through to it) showing the downward trend in car thefts over the last ten years:

This raises some interesting questions: Why has this happened? Has there been a change in police policy? Is it a societal change? Are thieves just stealing other things instead? Are modern cars getting harder to steal (unless you’ve managed to nick the keys)?

But instead of asking any of those questions, the Age chooses to build an article around the fact that in the last twelve months the number of cars under five years old that were stolen rose by… wait for it… 53:

While it certainly looks like thefts of newer cars — after falling for a number of years — seem to be trending up again (from 6.6% of all thefts in 2003-04 to 11%) that’s still only a slighter bigger proportion of a much smaller total.

(I did wonder if this could be explained due to a change in the proportion of newer cars out there. The article doesn’t mention it, but these stats are clearly pretty meaningless without that information, but I checked, and according to figures in table nine in this annual report from the ABS, and the corresponding tables from previous years, the number of registered vehicles under five years old looks to have remained pretty constant over the last few years, at about 30% of all registered vehicles.)

I couldn’t find figures for Victoria alone, so we’ll have to make do with these Australia-wide ones, but with a 98% increase in the number of VWs and a 32% increase in Hyundais on the roads over the last five years, it’s hardly surprising that thefts of “late models” are at all time highs. They didn’t sell anywhere near as many of those cars 5 years ago as they do today. There’s many, many more “late models” of those on the roads than older ones.

Look! Here’s a chart that shows how Jaguars are massively more secure cars than Holdens…

Just kidding. Of course it doesn’t show that at all, but unless you give me these figures as a proportion of the number of each make that are out in the wild, then the entire chart is just as meaningless.

Only then can we see which ones are “targeted” (if any). For example, I wonder why — based on those Australia wide stats — Toyotas only come in third on the thefts list when there appear to be more of them than any other car?

As it stands, The Age, all you’ve really demonstrated is that broadly speaking if there are more of a particular type of car on the roads, then more of them get stolen.

Next week in The Age’s Data Journalism column, a series of graphs exploring the defecatory habits of large furry mammals, and a companion piece on papal religious persuasion through the ages.

UPDATE (5/02): I was joking about the whole bears/pope thing, but imagine my amusement over lunch today when I found the next article from The Age’s Data Journalism unit. A massive free ad for trendsmapGround-breaking research across a two page spread revealed that people in Melbourne quite like sport and shopping but hate commuting. Wow. Just wow.